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There were a few things that I didn't like about WAR, but overall I thought it was a really solid game. If it were to go F2P, I would definitely give it another go. The low population is just not worth the sub right now.

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I thought WAR had a lot of potential. It definitely wasn't as bad as it's reputation precedes. It had balancing issues but I thoroughly enjoyed the player classes. 2 things stand out to me: 1. instanced PvP killed owPvP, which was the games strength. 2. It was released during the height of WoW's popularity, so people were quick to write it off and return to Warcraft.

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Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by LeahXtwo

Originally posted by maskedweasel It could be foolish, but when taking into account what WAR was, it was not the most terrible game to have launched. I was there on launch, and remember playing scenarios back to back consistently, having a ball in the PQs and enjoying the RVR lakes in the early gameplay, but as with most new games, the tier 3 and above content wasn't balanced properly and fairly unfinished.

WHAT?

He's right.WAR was awesomely fun, at the time, in the early game at launch. So many people, all the PQs and RvR lakes and scenarios popping, great combat mechanics...Just didn't have enough polish, and once you got high enough level the lack of polish and even completeness of content was SEVERLY lacking.

That was the weirdest thing about WAR for me. For all its faults and shortcomings, which were obvious to practically everyone who played the game, WAR was still entertaining to play overall. Probably thanks to interesting classes, even though it was missing a few at launch, and amazing RvR when it actually worked as intended when the game had enough players to properly support it.

Nature without Technology is little more than animals running about.Nature without Magic is without wonder or miracle..........Magic without Technology is fantasy.Magic without Nature is formless and useless..........Technology without Nature is application without understanding.Technology without Magic is repetitious and uninventive.

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Originally posted by Methos12

Originally posted by BadSpock

Originally posted by LeahXtwo

Originally posted by maskedweasel It could be foolish, but when taking into account what WAR was, it was not the most terrible game to have launched. I was there on launch, and remember playing scenarios back to back consistently, having a ball in the PQs and enjoying the RVR lakes in the early gameplay, but as with most new games, the tier 3 and above content wasn't balanced properly and fairly unfinished.

WHAT?

He's right.WAR was awesomely fun, at the time, in the early game at launch. So many people, all the PQs and RvR lakes and scenarios popping, great combat mechanics...Just didn't have enough polish, and once you got high enough level the lack of polish and even completeness of content was SEVERLY lacking.

That was the weirdest thing about WAR for me. For all its faults and shortcomings, which were obvious to practically everyone who played the game, WAR was still entertaining to play overall. Probably thanks to interesting classes, even though it was missing a few at launch, and amazing RvR when it actually worked as intended when the game had enough players to properly support it.

I actually get a urge now and then to go back to the game and play oPvP on the tier 1 humans map, the one where you fight in the city. Got some really fun times there, luckily it only takes a couple thoughts of what came AFTER that to get me grounded again.

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From being in WAR beta i'd say...alot. Mark Jacobs wasn't as relevant in todays market as he thought for one. With each beta update the game became more and more like WoW. Did you know battlegrounds wasn't released until the last week of beta? That's because the WoW kids wouldn't shut up about it and low and behold world pvp was dead because of it, which they built half the game around.

So all and all I'd say it was three major issues:

1. Mark Jacobs was a 1 hit wonder, likely carried by his team with DAoC.

2. They listened to the WoW kids

3. Game wasn't unique, there was nothing about it that jumped at you. Wasn't a reason to play it over anything else due to dead world pvp and all other features carbon copied.

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I had a lot of fun with Warhammer, when it came out it was fresh and "in your face" with the Warhammer universe so I geek'd out a bit. There were a lot of great ideas and some great ideas poorly executed, unsure if it's on the hat of MJ or the people above him. Either or the fixes didn't seem to come out fast enough, seemed the dev team was always focused on something else rather than fixes or overall improvements.

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War is a pvp game straight up, you do not play it for pve.

PvE in this game is unfinished and does not give you the points(RR) needed to get pvp gear for end game. I have no idea why PvE was even put into this game with the amount of unfinished PvE work. (PvE in this game is meaningless)

If ppl understand the above then this game can be fun providing they know it is 100% about PvP.

Second to that there also has got to be other players in the RvR zones. This game is great when there is actual RvR goin on, trouble is the population is not there to allow for this other then maybe prime times depending on server.

I have to admit, i love this game and have subbed to it on and off over the years, there had been enough going on to get me 30 or 60 days of fun a few hours a day if others were on at the right times. Donno about now, their forrms do not make things promising now.

Well i seem to have gone off topic here so -----> If they ever finsihed the game PvE wise, then this game might have had a chance cause really, no game out there is 100% PvP that has any real success.

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I was following this game for a while before it came out and there was a dead give away that the team was NOT about quality but where rushing the game out.It had to do with crafting,they started talking about a great crafting system,then as time went by they started detracting from it until it was like they didn't care about it at all.When i see a dev take the root of purposely cutting corners just to get a game out,i lose interest.

There was yet another important factor.I was looking forward to the videos they were putting out but in all of them they acted like children,i am not talking about funny,just immature,it really turned me off.

Yet another problem,if you are going to sell your game as a predominant PVP game RvR,you had better put a LOT more effort into it than just two factions.That is the LOWEST amount of effort you could possibly put in a RVR game.It points right back to point 1,rush the game out,just to get a game out.I can spot cheap lazy designs a mile away,they are right in front of our eyes to see.

I look for developers that are showing me they put some heart and soul into their game,i don't want to see assembly line game development,wit hsystems that could take less than a few hours to design.

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WAR was awesomely fun, at the time, in the early game at launch. So many people, all the PQs and RvR lakes and scenarios popping, great combat mechanics...

Just didn't have enough polish, and once you got high enough level the lack of polish and even completeness of content was SEVERLY lacking.

I didn't start playing WAR until a year or so after launch, but I did find it great fun and played it for a year or so.

Lack of polish was a serious issue. I was stunned that I could get stuck on what were very little more than pebbles and fall to my death from blades of grass. I mean the bugs were just... Wow. Oh, and the LoD? I know it doesn't matter to gameplay per se, but when any character more than a few yards from you turns into a weird repeating four frame run animation, it doesn't help things. And then there were the imbalances. While perfect balance is impossible to achieve, and probably not even really desirable, the imbalances were often pretty lol. Lastly, much of the PvE was flat broken, but to be honest no one I knew cared -- if you wanted PvE, WAR wasn't really going to be very satisfying.

Personally I didn't like the SCs past teir one or so, they were good for early leveling but quickly turned into farmville -- either farm or be farmed. Seperating organized groups from PuGs and having T4 class by RR as well as level would have helped, IMHO. Mostly they just weren't my thing, though, I wouldn't say they were a design mistake, much as I would have preferred the focus be on the lakes, nor would I say they were a good inclusion.

In any event, even with all the issues -- and they were legion -- the game was great fun... For a while. In the end I think the problem is that PvP isn't the "endless content" people try and pretend it to be. Very quickly you learn to assess enemies, both individually and groups, and pretty much know how things are going to go -- granted, the real fun is in defying those expectations, but that invariably ends up being the exception rather than the rule. There's only so many times you can take a keep, flip a zone, or what have you, and it's even harder to update and add to that than PvE because of the inherent need for things to remain 'fair -- have one side's keep even two microns close to their spawn point and you'll get eaten alive. Having all the capitals might have helped with longivity some, but in the end the result would have been the same. Personally I don't buy that three factions would have made squat worth of difference (human nature is not for the two weak factions to gang up on the strong, it's for the two weak factions to vie for favor with the strong), and I keep wondering how many times it has to fail (I'm looking at you, TSW and GW2, though no doubt those don't count -- they never do when things go south for PvP) before that particular myth dies a well deserved death.

As for whether or not Jacobs deserves credit or blame for WAR, if you're the one in charge both go with the territory and if you can't accept that you have no business being in that position.

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I played War for a year from launch and had soem great times but eventually I got tired of awful patches,extreme class balance swings and the broken end game(fortress and city invasions,RvR lakes in general were a lot of fun).Add to that an awful engine and no real sense of direction from the devs and most of my guild and myself quit at the same time.

On a side n9ot I can't believe the way the CU fanbois jumped all over this thread,I beleive we they have now taken the crown from GW2 fans as the most over sensitive and intolerant fans on these forums lol.

Their revisionist history of this game and Mark Jacobs remidns me of this forums reaction to old Smedley....100% villified until Smedley mentioned the word Sandbox and suddenly with that oen word people were saying he wasn't so bad etc.Now I don't hold Mark Jacobs solely responsible for what happend to War but he does command a large share of it.

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Originally posted by Drakynn

On a side n9ot I can't believe the way the CU fanbois jumped all over this thread,I beleive we they have now taken the crown from GW2 fans as the most over sensitive and intolerant fans on these forums lol.

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I loved this game when I first started, the tier one battlegrounds were amazingly fun. The I got to tier two and started to realize some classes were kinda OP. Got to tier three and realized the lack of balance sucked and pvp had lost its flavor. Tried making some new toons and playing in tier one for a while but finally just stopped playing. If they could have kept the magic of tier one though more of the game, i would have played forever.

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I actually enjoyed WAR for close to 6 months. I even had a lot of fun with it as it definitely had its upsides. Ultimately it had some major flaws that prevented me from staying with it in the really long term. Here's my take on some of the more major things that went wrong with WAR, in no particular order:

1. The world PvP was large-scale warfare, but they were too ambitious with the average Joe's computer power vs. the game's graphics rendered by the engine. I had to turn graphics down very low to the point where it wasn't very enjoyable to watch.

2. Gameplay wasn't always as fluid as one would wish. Collision detection glitched, animations would play when you made an attack even if you couldn't do the attack at the time. There were plenty of these. The game didn't come across as very polished.

3. Instanced scenarios took a lot of people away from PvP, and while some scenarios were a lot of fun, others were quite a bore.

4. World PvP was poorly thought out. You got rewarded for taking keeps, but not for holding them. People quickly started keep trading.

5. Too many characters with knockbacks and other types of CC made combat messy.

6. The world felt fragmented with its small areas separated by load screens. This made the MMO world feel small and not like a world.

7. The typical WoW-like level grind separated players across various tiers, making it difficult to enjoy the vast majority of the otherwise innovative Public Quests as wells as the open PvP zones. You were then forced to level up through PvP scenarios or a WoW-styled PvE leveling grind.

8. The tactics system was interesting, but overall I felt the character build system wasn't as engaging as it could've been.

9. The lack of a 3rd faction destroyed the world PvP as the side with the biggest RvR groups continually dominated, also causing people from the opposite faction to switch sides, making the matter worse.

10. The original concept of the 3 different fronts (Chaos vs Empire, High Elf vs Dark Elf and Greenskins vs Dwarfs) wasn't implemented.

It seems CU is addresses some of the issues WAR suffered from. Some of the real important ones, too. Time will tell if MJ avoids all of the mentioned pitfalls and avoid making too many new ones. 1, 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 at the very least shouldn't be an issue for CU.

"Tiny clown, he got wet. I was talking to a psychic and I can't sleep in the ozone. There are too many different peanuts, looking sad.

From what I played at launch and what I've just played now, they game seem a little better.

I'm curious from this community, do think it was Mark Jacobs failure as lead designer that crumbled the game ?

Even as lead designer he still took orders from someone else over at EA/Mythic even if it strayed from his vision, he did not get final say. The suits have all the power.

In my opinion you are just trying to get a bunch of doomsayers to agree and flood these boards with yet another obsured belief.

My wise advice, stop dealing in "What if's" and only deal in absolutes.

The suits traditionally do not hold "all the power". A lot is left up to the leads as they tend to know more about what is actually going on than anything. While I agree that Dren is taking this a bit overboard, this is indeed a fair question. Based on what I have seen I would put most of War's problems on Mj's head since at worst he is the one who holds all of the responsibility as lead.

The leads do more facilitation than coming up with all the ideas and implementing them. That is a team of people. As a lead you are also pressured by suits more so as well.

Suits: So.... MJ.... when will the PvP be done that is the last component... when can we get this out the door?

MJ: Well I have this great idea on how PvP should work, but, it will delay the game by an extra 3 months.

Suits: That is not going to work whatelse you got?

MJ: Well I got the standard PvP that we discussed and the team came up with. We can have that ready in 3 weeks.

That is not generally how its handled. While the suits will often set deadlines, and make demands for certain kinds of features its rarely that cut and dried, and they tend not to move the goal posts too much. That is sort of the leads job, setting the overall vision and keeping it on track. If the game sucks its because he screwed up somewhere.

Lol, ain't nobody got time for you... I am done. For the record I don't think it is that cut and dry but I didn't feel like writing a whole scripted story. I felt any pleeb could grasp the point I was trying to make.

I don't think Greg Zeschuk agrees with your point.

"No, I definitely reject it. And I can explain it too. The best analogy I use, in a positive way, is EA gives you enough rope to hang yourself. It was really interesting because we really made all the choices we wanted to make ourselves; these are all things we wanted to try. And that's something to remember - while we were independent we didn't have quite the resources we had as part of EA, and then we got to EA and it was like "wow we can do all this stuff." We had to be really thoughtful about what we wanted to focus on.

I remember this really distinct moment where - it was probably five or six months - we were just starting to wrap our head around how we worked with the company. And it took months for this formal period of joining EA, and learning how everything works, and when the initiation was done, we were sitting around asking how do we do stuff. It dawned on us, you just do it. That was the biggest revelation, that rope that EA gives you; they don't second-guess you, they don't say you shouldn't do that. We had complete creative control over a lot of it; some fans didn't like some of it and some of it was experimental, quite frankly.

The one caveat is at the end of the day for any company you have to run a profit, so you have to be thinking of things that actually make you profitable. So while you're taking all these creative risks in trying crazy stuff you almost have to simultaneously focus on the bottom line. The top line is not enough. In some ways, being independent I would say we had to be more conservative - being part of a big company, you could be more aggressive and try stuff. I think that's something people [struggle with] when they join EA; they do too much or they do too little."

Don't forget that when Warhammer launched, it had a LOT of empty servers. And i'm not talking about servers being filled up the first day or two then people leave, i'm talking about empty servers from the start that never filled up. Mythic assumed they were going to get a lot more players then they actually did. AND they assumed they were going to hold on to those players a lot longer then they actually did. They assumed they were going to be the next WoW in terms of popularity but their bad planning and bad coding ultimately brought their demise.